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Atom Egoyan’s cool gaze fails to fully serve the boiling narrative of Devil’s Knot, a story that seems destined to forever elude a satisfactory resolution.

More than 20 years and several documentaries after the horrific 1993 mutilation murders of three young boys in West Memphis, Ark., we still don’t know what really happened — but we do know that three teens were wrongfully convicted in a modern witch hunt as “satanic panic” engulfed a small God-fearing southern town.

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In focusing a dramatic lens on the case, casting Reese Witherspoon as a grieving mom and Colin Firth as a conflicted investigator, Egoyan goes in for the blandest of “based on a true story” approaches.

He mainly adheres to the known facts of the case, which have also been amply documented in numerous books. These include the one by Arkansas Times journalist Mara Leveritt that the movie is based upon and shares a title with, and which made considerably more impact than this film will.

Egoyan seems disinclined to get his hands dirty by venturing a bold opinion as to who really murdered the three boys, all of them 8 years old, whose naked, abused and trussed bodies were found in a muddy creek a day after they’d ridden their bicycles into a forest.

Police quickly focused upon three trouble-prone local teens — Damien Echols, 18, Jessie Misskelley, Jr., 17, and Jason Baldwin, 16 — and concluded “cased closed” when Echols was found to have an interest in witchcraft and the occult and the low-IQ Misskelley made a damning confession.

The three teens were convicted at trials the following year, with Echols sentenced to death (never carried out) and Misskelley and Baldwin sentenced to long jail terms. Investigative reporters and filmmakers later exposed police mishandling of evidence and witness coercion, leading to the 2011 release of the three men in a celebrated “no contest” plea deal.

This could be the stuff of raw drama, and occasionally is in Devil’s Knot, especially in scenes where Witherspoon and Alessandro Nivola, who plays her character’s shifty husband, quarrel over how best to grieve and who to point the finger of blame at.

But Egoyan and screenwriters Scott Derrickson and Paul Harris are content to treat the material as a cerebral courtroom procedural that ends abruptly and inconclusively, with regular Egoyan cinematographer Paul Sarossy capturing scenes that are lit as brightly as a TV movie.

Colin Firth’s private investigator character Ron Lax is based on a real person. But he comes across as a voyeuristic surrogate for the director, making for one of the least interesting Egoyan characters and most impotent gumshoes ever to hit the screen.

Denied standing in court because he’s not a lawyer in the case, grumpy Lax is relegated to peering from a distance or behind windows. His motivation for offering pro bono services to the accused — he doesn’t want to see them get the death penalty, even though he thinks they’re probably guilty — is as thin as the southern accent of Firth, who delivers a rare bad performance.

How much more interesting this movie would have been had Egoyan been willing to delve more bravely into conjecture, to go for what novelist Salman Rushdie calls the “human truth” of great fiction, where journalistic rigour isn’t followed but illumination is achieved nonetheless.

But that’s simply not Egoyan’s style. He’s never going to do what Oliver Stone did with JFK or Nixon, bending the truth or abandoning it altogether to amplify characters or to fuel a conspiracy theory.

Nor is Egoyan inclined to focus on the visceral horror-film aspects of the case. He’s as discreet here as he was in Felicia’s Journey, the story of a serial killer where the actual killing went almost unnoticed.

Egoyan remains much more comfortable as observer and ponderer of the innate and unfathomable. His greatest achievement remains The Sweet Hereafter, his 1997 film where a town’s collective grief over lost children could be blamed on fate or bad luck (a random school bus tragedy), rather than the deliberate human evil that Devil’s Knot is reluctant to explore.

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